Cannabis Commerce in the USA

Part 8: Hollywood, Inc.: Cannabis Commerce’s Champion

“Mama try to tell me, try to tell me how to live, but I don’t listen to her, cause my head is like a sieve.”

Decades ago, in Up In Smoke, Cheech Marin pranced across a stage in a pink tutu, singing, “Mama try to tell me, try to tell me how to live, but I don’t listen to her, cause my head is like a sieve.”

Peoples’ eyes bulged out of their heads.

Nowadays, five minutes don’t go by on an episode of Entourage, without some gleeful housemate slipping into sinsemilla-assisted satori.

Each episode is a veritable infomercial for the grandeur of ganja.

You won the girl, you fire up.

You lost the girl, you fire up.

You got the job, you fire up.

You lost the job, you fire up.

The pitch can be condensed into five words: “things go better with pot.”

That’s advertising!

HBO

Would you concede that, in 2009, HBO had its fingers on the pulse of a nation?

Building on the success of Entourage, HBO’s latest series offerings, Hung, Eastbound & Down, and Bored to Death, vie with it for the “Series Which Most Glorifies Cannabis” Emmy.

The preeminent cable network provides us a textbook example of cannabis commerce in action. It hawks a “Bored To Death Weed T-Shirt” at its online gift shop. Every bit of merchandising helps.

HBO continues its variations on a theme: even the vampires of True Blood exhibit a bloodlust for psychotropic vegetation.

Apparently, these undead are omnivores.

Showtime

“What is a weed? A plant whose virtues have not been discovered yet.” —Ralph Waldo Emerson

Showtime returns fire with Weeds. Sparks fly between a sexy suburban horticulturist and an accommodating DEA agent — among equally imaginative pot-lines plotlines.

Lotsa yuks on this one.

It’s no surprise Weeds is Showtime’s highest-rated show.

Californication capitalizes on herbage as much as cleavage.

Not content confining its leafy outreach to weekly series, the cannabis-conscious channel took dead aim at HBO’s many excellent documentaries with In Pot We Trust, a paean to medicinal cannabis.

Networks large and small

Anyone else have a hard time remembering network TV without pot topicality?

The Cannabis Planet TV newsroom. This is not taking place in a parallel universe. It’s here. It’s now.

Once interracial and gay themes became commonplace on the airwaves, pot was the lone taboo left standing. NBC’s The Office is one of numerous network offerings which brilliantly exploit it.

Prominent cable channel CNBC offers its continuing Marijuana and Money series.

Informative features include, “Edible Pot Hits the Spot,” “Your Money, Dollars & Sensimilla,” and “How to Start a Dispensary.”

On a more guerilla level, enterprising potworks such as the fascinating Cannabis Planet TV, with its convincing newsroom and winning anchorpeople, POT-TV, and Cannabis Common Sense, compete for viewers’ hearts and minds.

In an ingenious bit of programming, on Thursday and Saturday nights, LA independent KJLA presents Cannabis Planet — immediately following its telecast of the nascent Lingerie Football League.

Apparently the station can read minds.

The silver screen

And movies? It would be a lot harder to isolate recently released films which don’t feature marijuana themes than ones which do.

Need I name names?

OK, recent examples of “Stoner Cinema” include Knocked Up, Pineapple Express, Humboldt County, Harold and Kumar Escape From Guantanamo Bay, The Wackness, The 40 Year Old Virgin, American Beauty (not that recent, but it’s an Oscar winner — Best Picture, no less), Rolling Kansas, Road Trip, and Forgetting Sarah Marshall.

As you know, highly compensated Hollywood execs comb through piles of screenplays, until they find one they feel can rock the world. But it will only rock the world if it follows a simple formula: give the public what it wants. Savvy execs know that one surefire way of giving the public what it wants is “green-lighting” scripts rife with reefer madness.

$24.99 at HBO’s shop.

This equates to the “art imitates life” part of the “art imitates life, and life imitates art” axiom. In this case, Hollywood imitates you and me, who imitate Hollywood, which imitates you and me, and so on.

Going one step further, the same mass-psychology-conscious executives who insure writers, actors, directors and producers mimic the public’s current fascinations, also know that the inverse is also true — the public turns to the silver screen for behavioral cues about how to conduct every last aspect of their lives.

People copy how actors look and how they react in certain situations. If their day is a little dull, they do the exact same thing Entourage‘s “Turtle” would do — hit the local collective for an eighth of Blue Rhino.

That would be the “life imitates art” part. So, what effect does life imitating art have on cannatax ? Read on.

Before we leave art, can anyone name one movie or TV series which portrays pot in a negative light?

Well, let’s see … what about Reefer Madness?

OK, that’s one. The morality tale was released in 1936!

Celebrity consciousness

Hollywood Inc., with over a century to master the art of manipulation, has successfully brainwashed the public to remain in a heightened state of celebrity-consciousness.

If Joe Q. Public sees Ted Danson toking up before a big book release party on Bored To Death, it’s only natural for him to wonder if a few well-timed bong hits just might take the edge off that rehearsal dinner with the in-laws.

Celebrities that would seem to be doing a lot more than leaning toward legalization include … sorry, it’s too easy. Pick any actor, actress, director, producer you want! And don’t forget the crew members and the hundreds of people in the credits — you better believe they’re blazing away as they perform their roles on the production.

If a face is splashed on a gossip magazine, it was probably immersed in a vaporizer directly before or after the photo shoot.

Conclusion

To avoid further exposure to Hollywood Inc.’s unceasing canonization of cannabis-related escapades, you’d have to seek out reruns of The PTL Network.

Does this trend show any sign of abating? Er, none that I can see.

Drug crazed abandon? Insanity . . . sin . . . degradation . . . vice . . . Where do I sign up?

Is there indication that Hollywood, Inc. keeps getting better at both reflecting and inducing cannabis consumption? Why, yes. Plenty. Like everywhere you look.

As we’ve seen, the most powerful marketing force on earth presents legalization as a fait accompli.

What, if any, effect does Hollywood Inc.’s marketing aplomb have on cannatax projections?

It would take an incredible orator to argue it has no effect whatsoever. An incredible orator by the name of Jeff Miron has argued exactly that, in Part 2 of this report and in his April 2010 interview with Cannabis Commerce.

I’m not persuaded.

In a monkey-see, monkey-do world, Hollywood, Inc.’s unflagging support exerts constant upward pressure on cannatax projections.

Our last figure was $73 billion, attained after blending in the “Obvious Tax Opportunities Oddly Unaccounted For.”

I’d estimate the combined power of free advertising and free publicity by the best PR minds on Earth can produce ratchets that number up another … I want to say “at least 5-10 percent.”

I’m not going to. With respect to Jeff Miron’s cautious approach, I’m filtering my natural enthusiasm and typing 2%. That looks silly low. But there it is.

We’re staring at $75 billion.

Next section preview

Hollywood, Inc. has a huge influence on the public’s tastes. But it has allies, strong allies, motivated by a mutual need to keep cannabis consciousness in the public eye. Traditional media — radio, TV news, newspapers, magazines — isn’t giving way to social media without a fight.

And social media — Facebook, MySpace, Twitter, LinkedIn — with its ability to go viral, has the ammunition to fight fire with fire.

What field is the perfect battleground for traditional media and the internet to duke it out? The fertile marijuana field. What else?

Just try and get through a daily newspaper or a half-hour web crawl without taking a detour … to the dank side.